Words by Dr Tan Eng Loy, ARPS
Written in 2009 for the commemorative book – Light & Shadow: Tan Lip Seng’s 50 Years of Photography
Tan Lip Seng’s interest in photography began when he was studying in Tuan Mong High School. With his very first camera, a box camera, he took up photography as a hobby. Although he eventually adopted and practiced medical photography in a 42-year career with the Department of Medicine and the Department of Paediatrics at the National University of Singapore, his first love for pictorial photography blossomed into a lifetime passion that has remained till this day.
Completely self-taught as a photographer, in a time where photography was simply not a matter of pointing and clicking with an “all-things-automatic” camera and where photography involved patience and understanding of the nature of lighting and exposure, Lip Seng had to master the very fundamentals of photography before he ventured to develop his own unique flair and artistic style.
As his composition skills improved, he turned his efforts to mastering darkroom-print enlargement and processing. Gradually, he ventured into photo-montage work with colour transparencies, developing a unique technique with colour-derivation montage that was to earn him the distinction of being the first-ever Singaporean to be listed as The World’s Top Ten Colour Slide Exhibitors by the Photographic Society of America in 1969. This was an honour he was to keep for the next twenty years (till 1988, a record for which no Singaporean has yet managed to surpass till present).
With increasing international recognition of his work and style, Lip Seng started to travel extensively in promoting his work and techniques. The places he travelled offered new landscapes, culture and people, which he was to incorporate into his photography, gaining him even further awards and accolades. Through his travels, he has also forged strong ties and friendships with the photographic communities of the places he visited. His name is well-recognized by many in the photographic world in places including the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Australia, Austria, Belgium, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China and Indonesia.
The most recent decade has seen a worldwide revolution in the way photographers capture pictures. Digital photography has taken the world by storm and it is not uncommon now to see the man-on-the-street clicking away with increasingly compact and easy-to-use cameras. Still, the basics of photography that he learnt in his early years have continued to make Lip Seng’s work stand out in the digital age. Be it with the very first box camera that he started out with, to the Leica cameras he has been using to this day, or to the ever-improving and sophisticated digital cameras that he has begun to adopt, he has kept to the fundamental principle that have guided his photography for the last half a century: capturing the essence of a moment through the interplay of light and shadow.
He presents for the first time ever, in this exhibition (and book), a selection of almost 400 images that has been his labour of love for the past 50 years. It showcases his unique artistic style that has evolved over half a century, and which still continues to evolve today. Through these pictures, he hopes to inspire a newer generation of photographers to perfect their expression through the art of painting with light and shadow.
Dr Tan Eng Loy is the second son of Tan Lip Seng
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